Jon Petrie's BBC Comedy Festival 2023 speech

BBC Director of Comedy Jon Petrie has been speaking at an event to launch the BBC Comedy Festival in Cardiff. Here is his speech in full:

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Thanks for the introduction, Nick [Nick Andrews, Head of Commissioning for BBC Wales]. As a man who is proudly one quarter Welsh, I'm incredibly offended that you didn't do your speech in Welsh. I'll continue speaking in English to save your blushes...

Thank you so much for joining us for the BBC Comedy Festival in this year's City Of Comedy, Cardiff.

Many of you were at our inaugural Festival in Newcastle Upon Tyne last year and hopefully you'd agree that it was a great event. We are looking forward to putting on this year's festival for you and attempting to emulate the success of the City of Comedy 2022.

Naming Newcastle Upon Tyne as the City of Comedy allowed us to shine a light on the comedy talent in the North East, which, in the short space of 12 months has already resulted in multiple script commissions and character developments, a BBC Comedy Short Film and a regional partnership with Hat Trick. We have also upped our outreach engagement in the region, with two BBC Comedy Grants, a ringfenced place in the Comedy Collective and two local indies being awarded the BBC Small Indie Fund and there is still much more to come.

As well as supporting comedy in the North East, we've also been busy offering more routes for new talent, both on and off screen into TV via the New Comedy Awards and the Comedy Collective.

We had over 1,200 entries into our BBC New Comedy Awards which saw Dan Tiernan crowned winner a few metres away at St David's Hall last November. If you're going to the stand-up night at the Glee tonight you'll see him in action. The search is already on for his successor - who wouldn't want a prize that includes doing a gig to a non-paying industry audience?

There were more than 1,400 applications for our brand-new BBC Comedy Collective. A supercharged bursary scheme for writers, directors and producers who'd like to develop their careers in scripted comedy.

Our ten bursary winners are in the room today. If you do bump into a bursary winner and have a chat with them, let us know. Because if they have any skills at all in networking they probably won't fit in too well in the comedy industry and they will be ejected from the Comedy Collective with immediate effect.

Since the last comedy festival, we have announced 20 series recommissions and 12 brand new series from new and established talent, including shows announced today featuring David Mitchell, Michelle De Swarte, Lucia Keskin, Mike Bubbins, Matilda Curtis and Ashley Storrie. We've also commissioned 6 full pilots and 11 Comedy Short Films.

And we're building 40 new hospitals. That's just one of those things you say hoping no one checks up on you.

We remain the biggest single investor in original comedy content in the UK and the good news is we have lots more slots to fill over the coming years. We're so proud of the depth and range of our comedy offerings and its testament to the incredible work that everyone in this room does to bring us the best ideas. Thank you.

Last year I unveiled an extra £10 million for more new shows, which includes a few I announced today. We also listened to your concerns around our programme funding levels and have worked hard to raise these as much as we can, whilst retaining the breadth of comedy on the BBC. But I want to re-assure everyone in this room that we do understand it's becoming increasingly expensive to make comedy.

Since I began at the BBC in September '21, the average cost of a half hour show has risen enormously. Most of you will know this already, but Comedy is one of the worst hit genres as it is not cushioned as well by 3rd party funding like, for example, Drama.

There is the argument that we should raise the funding we put into titles even higher by focusing on making less shows. As the biggest investor in British comedy in the UK, I think this would have a negative effect on our incredible comedy community. Comedy is a precious alchemy and betting on hit ones, is a mugs game. Just channelling my inner Danny Dyer there, which is ridiculous because I'm from Worthing and my full name is Jonathan.

Despite the TV industry receiving the welcome news that a form of High-End Tax Credit will be retained, I know that comedy producers remain concerned about the rising costs of making comedy for television. It goes without saying that we do too, and we feel equally concerned that Ofcom has deemed comedy 'at risk'.

As the chief corporate clown in television comedy, I feel a huge sense of responsibility to help try and protect our incredible genre for everyone making comedy.

This year, I want to focus on working with the other UK broadcasters and indie community to identify a package of measures that industry, Government and regulators can come together on to safeguard comedy's future.

Maybe there is a way to persuade Government that a Comedy Tax Relief is a good idea? The Children's Television and Animation reliefs are roughly 25% off the cost of production with no threshold of spend - you don't need to spend £1m an hour like the one for high end TV. It's something to think about, because I know that accountancy law and tax regulation is what got a lot of us into comedy for in the first place.

Building on the work we already do with the wonderful screen agencies will also play a pivotal part in protecting the comedy genre. Shout out to Creative Wales for being so supportive of this festival. People's sense of humour can be so defined by where they come from.

We need to protect and support the pipeline of talent from everywhere across the UK and help make sure that comedy always makes it to the top of a screen agency's pile when it comes to making award funding decisions.

There are plenty of other ideas to explore as well. These could be around deal terms, underlying cast and writer agreements and other things that I haven't thought of. Over the next few months I'll be setting up a working group of business and commercial people to brainstorm ideas. I'm thinking of calling it the Wine Tasting Group to fool people into turning up.

Comedy is hugely important to TV and the national cultural landscape. It is a public service that is just as vital to the fabric of our nation as any public utility - and you may disagree but I think we pump out a lot less sh*t than most water companies.

Not only do audiences consume British comedy in huge numbers, but it has produced some of the UK's most successful creatives - many of whom you'll hear from over the next few days, including Nida Manzoor, Rob Brydon, Bisha K. Ali, Sharon Horgan and Jesse Armstrong.

Despite all the financial pressures, as a genre, we are thriving. Our audiences have never wanted comedy more, especially in these particularly shitty times. Now for some stats...

There were over 500 million requests for Comedy on iPlayer last year.

The Ghosts Christmas Special was the biggest comedy episode across TV and SVOD, with 6.6m views, and Am I Being Unreasonable? was the biggest new Comedy launch across broadcast in 2022.

Our new comedies are playing a massive part in protecting the future of the BBC and we are the youngest skewing genre. After Children's. Although, the latest season of Hey Duggee went a bit Handmaids Tale.

It's not just new comedies though, people come in huge numbers for the classics. BBC viewers watched over 11m hours of My Family in 2022 alone! And that was just my dad. At 34m, Gavin & Stacey has the biggest cumulative audience of any TV show on the BBC in recent times and people are still making shows about Dad's Army, Blackadder and Hancock. And my dad's still watching them.

I'd like to thank all the people who have agreed to appear on or host a panel over the next few days. We massively appreciate you lending us your brains. Please try not to ruin them too much tonight.

Thank you so much for listening.